Milan

We spent a couple days in Milan, partly to meet an American friend who was passing through. We had our first brush with the famous Italian bureaucracy there. We had a package of 7 rolls of developed film to send home. We looked up the address of the main post office on our transit map and confirmed it with our guidebook. It turned out to be a massive gaudy building stuffed with ornamentation, with 'Poste Italia' written in story-high letters on the top. Inside, the cavernous lobby was lined with windows -- 1 through 47 or something like that. None of them were labelled except with signs that say they are closed or are for mail. So we stood in a short line for awhile. Eventually, when we got to the front and showed the woman working behind the window the US address on our package, she said something long and passionate in Italian that included the number 4. So we went to window 4 and stood in line. There the woman behind the window eventually told us something passionate in Italian that involved pointing back toward the building entrance, and included the number 4.



We walked back toward the building entrance where she had pointed. There was nothing there except the building entrance. We walked out the entrance and around the corner, looking for another door. All the way on the other side of the building was another door. It was labelled Bank of Italy. We peered in. It appeared to be the Bank of Italy. We went back to the plaza where the map indicated to see if there was a building 4 on the plaza. An Italian man was telling some young English tourists, in
English, where something was, and we asked if they were looking for the international window of the post office. We and the English couple and another guy who had apparently also been searching for an international postal window finally reached the
right building, down the street a bit, not on the indicated plaza at all. The building was labelled with the names of lots of little unrelated office businesses; it had no Posta signs.



We went inside the first door on the left, as the friendly Italian guy had instructed. After standing in line for awhile, we got to the window, where an Italian guy asked us in Italian whether we wanted express mail or normal mail. I asked (I thought) in Italian, how much it would cost to send it express. He said, express or regular. I said regular. He said, "No, there" and pointed at the entrance of the big room. So we left the room and found another room with post office-like windows. We stood in line at the huge window that said Internazionale. The guy told us in English, "Stamp! Stamp! 4!" So we stood in line at bullet-proof glass enclosed window 4. Getting stamps involved going down to another window and putting our package into a box in the counter from which the number 4 postal worker retrieved it. She weighed it, sent it back through the box in the counter and we got our stamps. We glued the stamps on with a sticky brush and a pot of glue and went back to the Internazionale window. They tossed our package into a box of packages and we hope someday it will arrive in the US. We did not, among all those transactions, fill out any of the customs forms that are customary in other parts of Italy and Europe, so we may never see our 7 rolls of film again.



Also in Milan is the stupendous Duomo and the gorgeous Galleria, which if we have to have shopping malls is definitely how they ought to look.